The thirty-six-year-old Greenlandic photographer Inuuteq Storch didn’t know much about Inuit culture growing up. In school, for instance, he was taught about ancient Greek deities, but there was no talk of a native pantheon of gods. About ninety per cent of the Greenlandic population are Lutherans, a legacy of Danish colonial rule. So thoroughly did European missionaries stigmatize Inuit beliefs that, even now, the more pious members of an older generation consider an appreciation of Indigenous spirits to be a sign of something demonic afoot. The word “Torngarsuk”—a shape-shifting Inuit spirit believed to assist shamans—is today used as a swear word. Storch, though, saw in the deity an opportunity to rediscover the culture of his ancestors. Four years ago, he got a tattoo of Torngarsuk along the span of his left forearm, in the form of a bearlike creature with beady eyes. In a recent conversation, he described himself as part of a generation of younger Greenlanders trying to rediscover Inuit traditions. “We talk about how our culture has been erased,” he said, “and what we know now from the past.”
Tattoos themselves were among the Inuit practices suppressed by European settlers, and they turn up throughout the fifty-four photographs on view in Storch’s current solo exhibition at MOMA P.S.1., “Soon Will Summer Be Over.” One image features a man stretching open his jacket collar to reveal intricate curlicues and radial lines extending from his Adam’s apple, like something bursting forth from within. Storch took the photos across Greenland between 2015 and 2025, capturing offhanded tableaux and candid portraits of the people around him caught in mundane moments: eating, taking out the trash, catnapping in sleeping bags.
The stark Greenlandic landscape is a persistent presence in Storch’s photos, and low, horizontal sunlight is everywhere. In one of Storch’s pictures, an old man on a wooden porch angles his face up toward the sun. In another, a knockout image featuring two children resting on their backs, sunlight blazes with an almost divisive intent, turning one child’s eyeglasses opaque with its glare while leaving his friend’s face in shadow. Looking at Storch’s work, my mind went to Emily Dickinson’s musings on a “certain Slant of light, Winter Afternoons.” But Dickinson was observing her world at a latitude of forty-two degrees. Sunlight means something else entirely in photos made above or near the Arctic Circle, where noon could strike in darkness, depending on the season, and where golden hour might be a nearly constant affair. Storch told me that, at this time of year, sunsets last much longer in Greenland: “Fiery and very slow. Colorful.”
Storch grew up in Sisimiut, a town of some fifty-five hundred people, with no intention of becoming an artist. His father, a professional baker, would sometimes ask him to do menial tasks in the kitchen. Storch would scrub pans to the sound of public radio, its volume turned way up to cut through the sounds of machinery. In his free time, he liked playing music and building things, including paper airplanes augmented with specialized folds. He planned to become an engineer, but discovered an interest in photography through skateboarding, documenting his friends performing tricks. In 2009, he staged a small photo show at a local venue, whose director suggested that he attend Fatamorgana, a photography school in Copenhagen. He enrolled there, then did another year of training at the International Center for Photography, in New York.
Before Donald Trump began calling for the United States to annex Greenland—a prospect that a reported eighty-five per cent of Greenlanders oppose—plenty of Americans hadn’t given much thought to Greenland. American curators and critics certainly hadn’t. Now Storch is navigating the art world’s inclination to cast him as a cultural ambassador of some kind. Last year, he became the first Greenlander to represent Denmark at the Venice Biennale, and while there he pasted letters spelling “KALAALLIT NUNAAT,” the Greenlandic term for the island, over the word “DANMARK,” on the façade of Denmark’s pavilion. At the P.S. 1 show, a video work titled “Anachronism” features grainy, archival footage shot by other Greenlanders, forming a kind of collective portrait: a child exposing the teeth of a freshly hunted polar bear; a view from the hazy window of a twin-engine prop plane. At the same time, Storch is resistant to the idea that he’s somehow representing Greenlandic culture to the outside world. “I’m not saying, ‘This is us,’ ” he explained. “I’m just saying, ‘This is every day.’ ”
From “Keepers of the Ocean,” 2019.
Storch mines his own family albums and artifacts, as in the series “Porcelain Souls,” which features a slide carousel projecting photos that Storch’s parents took and letters they sent each other from across the North Atlantic. These scrapbook contents are shown at P.S.1 alongside Storch’s own photographs—a friend in a field of flowers, with a beer bottle in hand, or a group of young people piled into a canary-yellow pickup truck. His work has something in common with that of a young Ryan McGinley, whose point-and-shoot approach was similarly inspired by skater culture, and who also created images of social scenes that doubled as portraits of a time and a place. But whereas McGinley’s grittily intimate style had an erotic edge, Storch’s is tenderly attentive. One of his photo series, “What if You Were My Sabine?,” features images of houseplants, Soviet-style apartment blocks, and nighttime snow. It was named after the Greenlandic former lover of the Danish photographer Jacob Aue Sobol, who made a book of black-and-white pictures set in east Greenland, where he lived with Sabine and her family. Storch considers that book an authentic depiction of living in Kalaallit Nunaat, “because it’s not about Greenland life. It’s about his love with her,” he said. With his own work, Storch has landed on a similar approach. “I was, like, What am I? Who am I in my home town?” he explained. “Turns out, I’m friends and family.”
